


Over the Sound of Machine Guns

by nahemaraxe (zephyrina)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Croatoan/Endverse, Camp Chitaqua, Chuck is God, Drug Addiction, Fallen Gabriel, Hallucifer, Hurt Gabriel, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Supernatural Reverseverse, righteous man Sam
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-13
Updated: 2014-10-13
Packaged: 2018-02-21 00:21:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2448443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zephyrina/pseuds/nahemaraxe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Gabriel gets injured on a mission, he starts hallucinating Lucifer. He also starts developing a painkiller addiction. It's up to Sam to put a stop on it before things go downhill.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Over the Sound of Machine Guns

It’s a stupid idea. Of course it is. Gabriel’s not in tune with reality right now, and he supposes that the high fever is fucking with what’s left of his common sense, but that doesn’t change the facts. What he’s going to do might as well be the stupidest idea he’s ever had.

_Why don’t you just off yourself?_

That’s Lucifer’s voice, sounding concerned and sincere; mildly curious, maybe. Lucifer’s started talking to him since they brought him back to camp, and at first Gabriel thought he was hallucinating him. Now he’s not so sure about it, not anymore.

_Why?_

If anything, Lucifer’s persistent.

“‘Cause,” Gabriel says out loud, “‘Cause Sam took all. Away.” He glares at his boots. Even his shoelaces are gone, and he finds it personally insulting. He should tell Sam so; maybe he already did it. “Sam. Sam doesn’t admit, want to. About me. Croat bit me, but Sambo? Doesn’t wanna say it. Denying. Denial, denial.”

Lucifer says ‘ _oh_ ’ and falls silent, leaving Gabriel alone with his own thoughts. Somehow, they’re loud.

Oh, he can understand Sam, sure. Kid’s lost so much ( _everything_ ), and Gabriel’s the last one left. That’s why Sam got attached to him, up to the point that he keeps refusing to do what’s right and blow Gabriel’s brains off. Which is… cute. Dysfunctional and downright stupid, but cute.

Gabriel stumbles forward, using walls and trees to keep himself upright. The pain in his leg is enormous, and he finds himself comparing it to other, older pains. It feels close to when he got his wing almost torn apart during the First War, but less intense than being brought back to life. That, ah, that had sucked balls. Ten out of ten, really. The bite gets a solid eight in his list instead, and if the croat who did him wasn’t already dead, he’d rake all the Grace he’s got left and smite that asshole.

Looking down, Gabriel can see the wound. The fabric of his pants is torn and soaked in blood, and he can tell where the teeth marks are despite the gauze wrapped around it. Sam  _(_ _bandaged it, sweet Dad-who’s-fucked-off-somewhere, how’s that for denial?_ ) keeps saying that no, a bullet ricocheted ( _‘I’m sorry, Gabe, I’m so sorry’_ ) and shattered the bone there, that it’s no bite, that he’s not turning ( _‘You’re okay, I swear you are’_ ), that the wound got infected, but Gabriel  _knows_. He does, and if asking Sam to kill him got him nowhere so far, then he’s going to take the matter in his own hands. Somehow.

“Where are you going?”

That’s not him hallucinating people, that’s Chuck. Real Chuck, hovering and looking puzzled. “You should be in bed. Your leg—”

“Stay the fuck away from me,” Gabriel says (he thinks he does, but it comes off all slurred, consonants and vowels jumbled together). “Okay?”

Chuck, who’s always been wary around him and never looks at him in the eye, steps aside. There’s someone else too, and he hears voices, Chuck talking, then a woman (Rina? Reva?) says, “Go get Sam,” and no, fuck it,  _no_. He grits his teeth and reaches out, wanting to shove someone - anyone, it doesn’t matter who - away. He almost falls over instead, and when his weight ends up on his bad leg, he blacks out.

+

His cabin again. He’s back there, the idiots brought him back, _w_ _hy did they, why, they’ve got a death wish what’s wrong with them with everyone why can’t they just let him go give up give—_

Noises are coming from outside of his cabin. Thudding-thudding-creaking-thudding. Silence. Voices. Thud-creak-thud again.

_Brother, someone’s out there-_

“Yeah, Sherlock, I know,” Gabriel says. Trust Lucifer to point out the obvious; Gabriel’s familiar with the stair that leads to his cabin, the third step creaks and so does the sixth. Someone’s about to show up, and it doesn’t take a genius to guess who. He pushes the blanket aside and gets up-falls off the bed.

+

The cabin door won’t open. Sam tries pushing the handle again, but it doesn’t budge.

“What’s wrong?” Chuck asks. For some reason he’s there too, and he’s frowning at the door. “Is it stuck?” He touches the wood, raps his knuckles against it. “It wasn’t when we brought him in. I shut it myself, and I checked the lock, no key.”

“Yeah, I took it because I was worried he’d do something stupid like locking himself in. Not that it stopped him from doing other stupid things,” Sam says. He shouldn’t have left that morning, but their med supply was running too low, and he doesn’t trust anyone else in picking up Gabriel’s painkillers. Former celestial being or not, he’s a damn lightweight: Oxy had almost sent him into OD that one time he had it, and Vicodin had knocked him out flat for a day. Sam’s been giving him Tylenol with codeine since then, which seems to be effective enough; on the flipside, it makes him hallucinate stuff. Stuff like having been bitten by a Croat rather than just (ha,  _just_ ) having an infected bullet wound.

“What are you going to do?” That’s Chuck again. “I’m not sure, but he didn’t look great before. Not that he ever did since he got shot, you know. It’s been, what, uh, a week?”

The urge to grab him and shake him is strong. Chuck’s a good guy, but what he’s implying - that Gabriel’s not going to get better, that it’s a waste of antibiotics and painkillers - grates on Sam’s nerves. He puts his hands on the door, not trusting himself to let them hang to his sides any longer. It’s better if they’re away from Chuck; it’s better if he focuses.

Pushing doesn’t get him anywhere. Sam tries putting all his weight behind it, but nothing happens. The pushes become hits, until he’s slamming his shoulder against the wood and fear (frightfright _panic_ ) makes him feel cold.

“What if—”

Chuck never manages to finish his sentence, because Sam bangs the door with a fist. He doesn’t want to hear about any ‘what ifs’. Not from Chuck. Not from anyone.

“Gabe! Gabriel!”

No answer comes from inside the cabin. It can be because Gabriel’s still out of it, it must be, but the cold is spreading inside Sam. He hits the door again.

“Open the door! Gabe! Can you hear me? Open it, I can’t get in!” he shouts, and he tells himself that the wood is too thick, that his voice can’t really go through, and fuck it, why didn’t he put his foot down and move Gabriel to his own cabin? “Please!”

“Sam?”

Chuck is pointing to the left. “What about that?” he asks, meaning the window. It’s so small it can hardly be called as such, and there’s a plastic sheet nailed to the frame rather than glass, but it’s an opening all the same. Sam feels stupid for having forgotten, and as he runs toward it, he wonders if he forgot about anything else. If he slipped. If he mixed things up. If he got distracted maybe, and gave Gabriel Vicodin ( _Oxy_ ) rather than Tylenol. If.

San doesn’t go for finesse when he reaches the window, he just grabs the plastic and pulls.

Gabriel’s there, all right. He’s also sitting with his back against the door - the door stop, he jammed it between that and the floor - and from that angle, Sam can’t tell if he’s breathing or not. He sees the white of the bone sticking out of the skin ( _again, Jesus fuck, again_ ) just fine, though.

+

It’s Chuck who slips inside and unblocks the door, all the while bitching about splinters and rusty nails. Another time Sam would have told him to shut up, but right now Chuck’s words are background noise. He only catches the important bits, ‘ _don’t worry, he’s alive_ ’, and  _breathes._

+

Later on, after he moved Gabriel to his own cabin and helped Tyler reset the bone, Sam goes back to pick up clothes, food rations. The pills are there too, some on the coffee table and the rest still into their plastic bottle. Sam scoops them up - four, the ones Sam left him last night minus the one Gabriel must have taken after he woke up - and shifts them in his palm. Thinking. Considering.

When he walks out, half an hour later and with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder, the pills are still on the coffee table.

+

Sam has been bracing himself for… well, he doesn’t know what, exactly. Pain and rage, another shattered lightbulb maybe; something along those lines. What he gets instead, what happens after Gabriel wakes up in his cabin, it throws Sam a curveball.

Oh, there’s pain, there’s rage, and there’s also a whole set of lightbulbs blowing up, but all that is the tip of the iceberg. As hours tick by, Gabriel gets more and more restless. He’s unfocused, confused, his consciousness switching on and off. One moment he’s asking Sam to give him his damn pill,  _right the fuck now, bucko_ , and the next he’s talking to Lucifer as if his brother were there. Hearing Gabriel’s one-sided debates is freaky. A small part of Sam wonders if that can be considered praying, if Lucifer ( _Dean who’s not Dean_ ) can hear him. If Lucifer ( _Dean, but that’s not Dean_ ) is about to show up, reeled in by Gabriel’s ramblings about bites. Sam hopes not. He’s not ready to face that just yet, and whenever the hallucinations kick back in, he slips a hand in his pocket and clutches at his knife until it’s over. Sometimes, if Gabriel goes on for a while, Sam snaps at him, _shut the fuck up, for Christ’s sake, he’s not here._

If hallucinating Gabriel is bad, conscious Gabriel is worse. When he’s awake and fully centered, fully there with Sam, he’s twitchy and angry, gritting his teeth against the pain. He doesn’t say anything unless Sam presses him, but it’s obvious that his leg is giving him hell. Even having the wound exposed to the air - not too cool or too hot, just freaking  _air_  - when changing the bandages has him white-knuckling the sheet. To add insult to injury, Gabriel winces every time he shifts around in bed, and Sam half-coaxes, half-forces out of him the admission of his joints aching something fierce. “They’re singing hallelujah,” as he puts it.

And then there’s the night when they’re both awake, and the moon is low, and the camp is still and silent around them, as if in waiting. The air seems thick, almost sticky, and Sam has to slow his breathing until he’s aware of each inhale, each exhale. Then Gabriel speaks up. He tells Sam about the bugs he feels crawling under his skin, that he’s going crazy without his pills just as much as he was going crazy with, so what’s the point?

And Sam doesn’t answer, because he doesn’t know what to say. While he lies next to Gabriel, feverish and full of pain, Sam feels like he’s going crazy too.

+

It takes three days for the withdrawal to lessen, and another one to vanish completely. By that time, the infection is gone too, and the grip around Sam’s chest lessens somehow. He has no idea when he’s started caring about Gabriel’s well-being, and to an extent, that pisses him off. Their shared history is messy. Sometimes it feels like the string of Tuesdays and Gabriel’s fake death stunt still hang between them, and the hook ups they’ve been having since they ran into each other don’t cut it. Not quite. Still, the past two weeks scared the shit out of him. Even now, busy as he is with checking Gabriel’s thigh, Sam catches himself holding his breath, wary of the reaction ( _relapse_ ) he may cause.

What he gets - of course - is miles away from anything he’d ever anticipate.

“I’m sorry,” Gabriel says. Just that, which is… odd. Gabriel’s not big on the whole apologizing thing.

“Sorry about what?”

“I don’t know, this whole clusterfuck?” He spreads his arms and looks around. “Me getting shot, me hallucifering all over the place? Or thinking I was about to go down in a blaze of braindead?”

“Okay, but it’s not your fault. You didn’t ask for—”

“Maybe I didn’t,” Gabriel says, interrupting him. It’s something Sam hates, and they both know it. “But riddle me this, then: how many extra trips did you make to get me painkillers? Antibiotics? Maybe with your fingers plugged in your ears, so you wouldn’t hear people saying it was a waste of time?”

Sam focuses on his hands. They want to curl into fists, but he doesn’t let them. Not now. Focus. Fingers splayed on his own thighs, away from Gabriel. Focus. “Your point?” he asks when he trusts his voice again.

“You shouldn’t have. It happens again, you treat me just like anyone else.” Gabriel shakes his head. “It took you an hour to find me, right? I got shot, and the car blew up, and you didn’t know whether I was dead or alive, but you came back anyway.”

“I did.”  _Focus._  “I’d do it again.”

“So you die and this sorry excuse of civilization we have here goes ka-boom. Nice plan, kiddo. You spent your past life trying to invade Russia in December?”

Another time, Sam would have snorted. Now he just keeps his voice real low, real quiet when he says, “And if you die?”

“If I die, I die.”

What Gabriel has just said is so stupid, so insulting that no amount of focusing will help. Sam reaches out and grabs his by his shirt, pulling him forward until they’re face to face (the first time they kissed it went like this, Gabriel pushing and Sam pushing back, and the deja-vu almost makes Sam dizzy).

“Walking into my life, fucking it up, and leaving is a trend that’s gotta stop. You hear me?”

“Jesus, you’re in deep,” Gabriel says, but he soothes the sting of it by resting his forehead against Sam’s.

That will have to do. They’re not actors, this is no movie, and it’d take more than a half-assed, five minutes talk about feelings to make Gabriel change his mind. Regardless, it’s pretty much all Sam has. He’s not going to let it go.

+

Later on, after they had sex (‘Long time no sixty-nine, Samsquatch’) and Gabriel fell asleep, after Sam rechecked the bandages and tucked them both in, Sam finds himself wide awake. Last time insomnia hit him, Gabriel was begging for his pills and cursing him seven ways to Sunday; it’s a memory that makes him grimace.

“You’re staying,” he says. “You’re damn staying.”

**Author's Note:**

> Self-indulgent AU where Sam is the Righteous Man and in charge of Camp Chitaqua, while Gabriel is fully human. A big thank you to greymichaela and Valentina, both for their beta job and for holding my hand through this <3
> 
> Fill for my 'broken bones' prompt (hurt_comfort bingo)


End file.
